


Strong Flower

by ahimsabitches



Category: Treasure Planet (2002)
Genre: Gen, Self-indulgent fluff, bonnie and john have 3 cubs, john remembers an old love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 09:11:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20654747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: Bonnie and John are expecting their third cub, and naming it is a family affair.





	Strong Flower

Sophie rounded the corner of the bar into the kitchen, holding the comm reader in both her chubby little-cub hands. “Mum jus’ called. She said to tell you she loves you and she’ll be home tomorrow night.”

John smiled as the newly-sharpened butcher knife on his cybernetic arm chattered through strips of tenderloin. “Aye, good, lassie. Did she say how she was feelin’?”

Sophie shook her head, slinging her brown curls across her face. “But she smiled bigger. Looked better.”

John nodded. He wasn’t keen on Bonnie spending so long so far away from home when she was so close to giving birth, but Bonnie would do as Bonnie would do and no force or word he possessed could turn her when she was set on her path. This was their third cub, and she knew herself well enough by now. She’d come home when she knew she had to.

It didn’t stop him from worrying, though.

“I think we should name the baby Reuben if it’s a boy an’ Rose if it’s a girl,” Sophie said.

“Aye? Why so, lassie?” John cut a quick, amused glance down at his eldest. Eyes not quite his and not quite Bonnie’s looked back at him, the shape of youth around them and the somber glow of an old soul inside them.

“Because I like Rs,” she said. “They’re strong.”

“So they are,” John said. He crossed the kitchen in one sweeping step, hooking a bottle of purp oil off a shelf as he went, and upturned the cutting board full of meat into the waiting skillet. Flames leapt toward him in a brief, flashing wall, hissing and spitting madly, and John leaned back until the flames subsided and the sizzle calmed. He breathed deep of the scent of searing meat.

“Pity yer mum’s gonna miss this dinner,” he winked at Sophia, standing with eyes wide and mouth shut at the edge of the kitchen, as if trying to absorb every sight, smell, movement, sense. Sometimes it unnerved him, how hungrily she stared. But now, in the kitchen, she reminded him of her mother.

Bonnie had gazed at him with the same eager focus in the humid yellow glow of the Ursa Major’s galley not so very long ago. He’d taught her how to make the crown jewel of his repertoire, the heirloom of his family, the Bonzabeast stew he’d held up as a pinnacle of Ursid cooking… the Bonzabeast stew she’d improved then and they’d perfected later on. 

He chuckled at himself, at the half-skip his heart still took. At the brief flare of heat down low in his belly when he thought of her in that galley not so long ago, of the sweat trickling down her temples, of her lips parted and brows lightly drawn with effort, of the way her apron cupped her tits and snugged around her waist. Not so very long ago.

“Or Pansy if it’s a girl. Flower names’re good too,” Sophia said, drawing John out of memory back to the sizzle and scent of the present.

“Mmm. Maybe not Pansy,” he said, drizzling oil over the meat.

He and Bonnie had just kept the name upon which they’d decided to call Sophie if she’d been a boy: Marick. Ursid tradition dictated the firstborn male be named after his maternal grandmother, but Bonnie’s mother’s name– Margaret– hadn’t been easily masculinized. Marick had been their compromise. Bonnie, for reasons John still did not understand, was attached to the name Valrick, which sounded too much like a bloody pompous Federation blighter to him. But since he could not think up an alternative to Margaret, they’d met, literally, in the middle. Marick.

Since Aurie now carried the middle name they would have used for Marick– Grey– they’d settled on a nod to John’s first mate and ex-First Mate: Gregory.  
If Bonnie delivered a girl, they’d all but decided on a name absent any familial obligation and one they both liked: Thalia Jorah, in a subtle nod to John himself and to follow the pattern they’d inadvertently established with their first two: Sophia, Aurelia… Thalia. But John indulged Soph. He could do little else.

Aurie chirruped from the living room. John glanced over his shoulder at her, standing in her playpen, her tiny fingers clinging to the mesh like an inmate at his cell bars. Sophie, tall for her age despite her mother, padded into the living room, leaned over the gate and heaved her little sister out.

“Petunia?” Sophie asked, then crinkled her nose. “Eugh, no. That sounds like an old lady.” She hauled herself and Aurie up into John’s cavernous old recliner and shook a rattle-toy in front of Aurie’s face. She squealed with delight and grabbed at it with amusingly uncoordinated hands.

John chuckled. “Right about that one, lassie. Y’ got a great-aunt Petunia kickin’ round somewhere. Twice as old as me and five times as ornery as yer mother.”

“Ooh! How about Rue?”

John cocked an eyebrow. “Rue? That’s not a flower, is it?”

“Mhm. Herb with little white flowers. Or yellow. Mum says they used to use it as a soothing thing.”

John hiked an eyebrow. How the cub only a year into speaking full sentences knew the word _repellent _and the proper context in which to fit it sailed over his head, but Soph had been beyond her years from the beginning: smiling, sitting, walking, talking.

_Little blighter’s gonna be smarter than me an her mother before she’s twenty, _John thought to himself, with equal parts amusement and chagrin.

But he did like the name Rue. It was simple and strong, with a soulful softness that made him smile. “I like it, lassie, I surely do.”

He rolled names around in his head: Rue Jorah; Jorah Rue; Thalia Rue; Rue Thalia, and found the bell of sureness in Thalia Rue. It sounded good. He’d bring it up to Bonnie when she got home.

“She needs a middle name too,” Sophie said from the chair, the comm reader up and glowing in front of them. Aurie pawed at it. Sophie pushed her hand away.

“How about Rue as a middle name an’ somethin’ else for the first?” John asked. “Thalia’s a good firs’ name.” John pulled the yams out of the oven and sniffed them. The garden had been good to them this year. Their harvest was large and delicious.

Sophie stuck her tongue out and squinched up her face. “Bleh! That sounds like an old lady too.”

John chuckled. “Well yer mother an’ I both like it.”

Sophia leaned back in the chair, her hand thoughtfully over her mouth in a gesture that was both adult and childish. “Hm. Flower names. Heather. Lily. Violet. Joquil. Iris. Dahlia. Susan. Delphine. Clover. Bryony. Ooh, I like that one. Calla? Azalea? Elodie? Oh! Pap! I _got _it!” Sophie chirped and jerked upright, nearly spilling Aurie and the comm reader off her lap. “_Daisy_! Daisy Rue! Pap, it’s _perfect_!”

Apprehension twisted in his gut for an instant. “Ah, lass, I… I don’ think yer mother’d be too keen on that name.”

“Why not?”

John suddenly found an insistent itch on the back of his neck. “Well, eh. Y'see, I had… an old flame. Her name was Daisy.”

Sophie cocked her head. John could all but hear the gears in her mind whirring. “‘Old flame’?”

Heat rose in John’s cheeks. Though Bonnie had never shown anything short of grace the few times he’d mentioned her, he knew the memory of the sirens had stuck in her craw. He’d only needed to see the ripple of muscles under her cheek and the brief flash of coldness in her eyes whenever he said Daisy’s name.

Though Daisy was long dead and though John loved Bonnie with every shivering atom of him, Daisy would always haunt her, and nothing John could do or say could change that. Bonnie would have to shake that ghost off on her own.

John sighed and reached behind him for his apron strings. “'Old flame’ means, eh, old love. Before I fell in love with yer mother, I was in love with Daisy.”

Sophie blinked. “Oh. What happened?”

“She died.”

“Oh.”

John scooped a large plate for himself, a small one for Soph, and a saucer for baby Aurie. Soph leaned over the arm of the chair, her eyes unfocused and her brows furrowed. “C'mon, lassie. Mess call.”

Sophie carried the babbling Aurie to John, who swung her up, planted a kiss on her tiny forehead, and sat her in the high chair his father had built for them. Sophie sat across the small table from John, and they ate in easy silence, John feeding Aurie bits of yam and tenderloin.

“I still like Daisy Rue the best,” Sophie said.

“It’s very pretty, but I don’t think yer mum’d like it.”

The more he thought about it, the more he liked it. It didn’t fit their pattern, but so be it. It seemed to fit something else, some knowing in him he couldn’t articulate. This knowing, this instinct, had steered him nearly unscathed through almost a century of dangerous work, and he could no more ignore its insistent ping in his brain now than he could ignore Aurie’s cries in the middle of the night.

“We’ll see,” he told Sophie. “I’ll run it by Mum. See what she says.”

The next night, after the bustle of Bonnie’s homecoming had died, she sat in her chair beside John’s, her belly leaving little room for Aurie in her lap, and blinked at John, her gaze green and unreadable.

“I told Soph I’d at least ask,” he said apologetically. “I know we sorta decided on Thalia Jorah, but… we could jes’ go wid’ Talia Rue, or….”

Sophie sat in John’s lap and leaned on the arm of the chair toward her mother. “Daisy Rue is better than Thalia Jorah, Mum. Much better.”

Bonnie looked at her.

“Ay-ee!” Aurie said. “Ay-ee!”

Bonnie looked at her, then Bonnie looked at John. He smiled, ready to compromise on Thalia Rue, hopeful for Daisy Rue.

After a while, Bonnie heaved a sigh. “Okay. But if it’s a girl, we call her Rue.”

John and Sophia beamed identical grins.

“Deal,” John said.


End file.
